Homeostasis and social justice
Antonio Damasio has a new book, and started a Twitter account apparently to promote it. Interesting thoughts.
Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors and negotiators of human cultures. #TheStrangeOrderofThings
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 18, 2018
Love, compassion and gratitude are emotions and are forces for the good. Only negative emotions such as anger, hate or contempt are destructive. Blaming emotions for our social ills misses that critical distinction.
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 26, 2018
Claiming reason as the solution to social ills misses the point that often facts and arguments only improve conditions when they persuade and prompt action. Persuasion requires emotions and feelings as the critical negotiators.
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) January 26, 2018
That in a nutshell is what I tried to argue in a Free Inquiry column responding to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter aphorism:
Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.
I said no, evidence is necessary but not sufficient, you have to start farther back – with human needs and feelings. I learned that partly from reading Damasio, so I’m glad to see he has a new book.
The immune system, the hypothalamus and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause: the deep biological mechanisms behind what we now call pain and pleasure.
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) February 9, 2018
The natural force of homeostasis, present in the simplest organisms, carried over into organisms with nervous systems, was expressed as feelings, and motivated creative reason. It has remained pervasive in cultures. #TheStrangeOrderofThings
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) March 6, 2018
Wanting to feel good rather than bad, in short, and then extending that to other people – that is, realizing they have the same need and want, and grasping that fairness means extending the good things to everyone. Fairness is part of homeostasis too, it’s the solution to the discomfort of seeing or enacting injustice – unless of course you’re like a Trump and genuinely see your own needs as the only needs that matter.
The force of homeostasis can be diminished and subverted in the cultural space. It needs to be strengthened by intentional civilizational efforts guided by agreed-upon humanist values. #TheStrangeOrderofThings
— Antonio Damasio (@damasiousc) March 6, 2018
That’s the latest one.
Though perhaps Descartes’ Error was not entirely fair to Descartes, Damasio has long been one of my favourite authors, and The Strange Order of Things is on my reading pile.
(But I have to confess that the first thing that came to mind upon seeing the mention of Damasio on Twitter was something like “Oh no, not Damasio too.”)
The iconoclastic cognitive psychologists Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated that human perception of “evidence” is not always logical, emotions and feelings may be the illogical negotiators. If the force of homeostasis, a defensive mechanism, needs to be strengthened by intentional civilizational efforts guided by agreed-upon humanist values the quirks of human perception need to be taken into account. Humanism is comparative mattering, the name gives it away. Humans aren’t separate from nature.
Aren’t the deep biological mechanisms (neural responses) in large measure involuntary?
Dopamine satisfies the neurology of human addicts and bees. Happiness?
Oxytocin mediates social cognition, promoting both local loyalty and antagonism to outsiders depending on doses. My potential to behave like the SS is built in.
Cortisol? Adrenaline?
Western civilization has been a juggernaut: wheat, sheep, cattle; human ownership of land, irrationally as if humans are separate from the biosphere; social hierarchies. Standing Rock (U.S.), Oka (Canada): it’s like 10,000 years ago is yesterday.
Life is irritable, a response present in the simplest organisms: selective cell membrane transport; invertebrate nervous systems amoeba, jellyfish …
Does this sound pessimistic? Or realistic?
Perhaps Sapolsky is a bit more optimistic when he notes in Behave that testosterone doesn’t actually promote aggression, rather it promotes “high status ” behaviour so if high-status people were gentle and friendly, just imagine what the world would be like…
But at a deeper level, I would contend, comes self-preservation. Any animal capable of defending itself via the fight or flight response must have built in, until shown otherwise, a sense of self: that is, of its own identity. The higher up the phylogenetic tree we go, the stronger this perception of self probably is.
But that is not necessarily so. Attack an ant, and you will get a fear/fight/flight response. Attack a philosopher, and you will get much the same. The two could be working at exactly the same perceptual level.
I was talking to one of my profs yesterday about contractarian political (popular, since Rawls revived the tradition) and ethical (an eccentric minority) theories, among other things how so many of them seem to rely on a “rational actor” model of humanity. Having read Damasio (and Haidt), I don’t think I am primarily a rational actor: I’m an emotional actor, with a bit of rationality smeared on top to make me better at satisfying the other bit. Hume was right: reason is slave to the passions.
Sure, one can take the reductionist approach and say that in the final analysys, from bacteria to ants to humans, it does all come down to the interactions of chemicals controlling processes, as components of systems that have evolved to be successful self-replicators. So it may be that at base the process that triggers the response is the same whether one pokes an ant colony with a stick, or argues with a philosopher, but humans have also evolved a self-reflective layer which makes the latter interaction rather more complex.
I think it is fair and useful to distinguish phenomena and behaviours depending on whether they arise from instinct, emotion, or rationality. And certainly the rise of several nasty populist governments looks like a negative example of the success of appeals to emotion. (Though one might also argue that it’s also equally based on an appeal to DIY rationalism, empowering people to discount the value of the conventional wisdom and expertise put forward by the “elite”.) But several decades ago Damasio cited a striking example of the need for emotion when he described the case of a man with a brain injury that damaged his systems of emotion while leaving his reasoning intact. He scored well on intelligence tests, but was completely unable to function in normal life, becoming paralyzed with indecision when trying to make what for most people would have been trivially simple decisions like trying to decide which colour tie to wear, or choosing between 2 different routes to a destination.
….I was also lamenting on how many books I want to read (she supplied another suggestion). So Damasio would be another one. Sigh.
Yes but it’s better to have more books to read than time to read them in than it is to have too few.
Theo Bromine @ 1 – ha, I know, it was nice to find something to share that wasn’t a case of “oh goody another bro defending a handsy bro.”
[…] a post at Butterflies and Wheels grabs some tweets from Antonio Damasio about his new book. I looked up the book on Amazon and decided that it didn’t interest me, as it’s pretty […]
Just for full disclosure, in addition to the comments here, I followed up by reading “The Meaning and Legacy of Humanism”, an exchange between Yuval Harari and A. P. Norman, Free Inquiry, April/May 2018, p. 34 and the link in the footnote on p. 37 which debate informed views of humanism in contrast to the superficial comment in the post #2.